Thursday, July 31, 2008

I found myself completely out of super plus, mega-absorbent, big as a trailer tampons right when I needed them.

I rushed to my small, local grocery store to buy a box, but they were sold out.

I don't typically spend a lot of time in the tampon aisle checking for new features and weighing my options so I just grabbed a box that looked like Husky Texan Tampons that could alternatively be used to chink holes in log cabins.

Later, I noticed that I had bought a product called The Pearl by Tampax.

Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out what was so “pearly” about this giant, cotton product.

What was the “pearl” feature and what was it supposed to be doing for me?

What did "pearl" MEAN?

I read the box.

I looked at the insert.

Nothing.[Fire your ad agency, Tampax!]

Since I have no shame coupled with a relentless need to UNDERSTAND, I accosted my (female) colleague and said,

“Have you heard of these “Pearl” Tampax? What’s the Pearl part about?”

She hadn’t heard of them, but she was willing to brainstorm.

[We are nothing if not a problem-solving team at work.]

“Hmmm. Pearl…,” she said. “It brings to mind smooth edges. Does it have a paper or plastic applicator?”

“Plastic,” I said.

“Well!” she said. “That’s not very environmentally friendly. I thought Tampax’s whole thing was the PAPER applicator.”

“True,” I said. “It’s Playtex who have the petal-soft, plastic applicator, right?”

“Ugh!” she groaned. “I hate those because the opening where the tampon comes out makes the applicator look like it has teeth. I can’t use those. I’m not getting tampon teeth anywhere near... you know...”

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Apparently he had been circling our table for a while, but we hadn't noticed.

[He found this increasingly frustrating.]

But I am ahead of myself.

After making absolutely SURE that the Loch NessScotch would never be seen again, Deana and I hitch hiked to the north eastern coast of Scotland and took a ferry to the Orkney Islands.

[Known for their disturbingly small ponies.]

After spending a lot of time at the wharf pretending that the ferry horns were the sound of my mighty wind escaping, we found our way to the local pub.

It was 10:30 p.m., but we were so far north that outside the windowless bar room it was still quite sunny.We did not yet know that drinking (excessively) in an establishment without windows in the far north of Scotland would result in the eerie experience of stumbling out to broad daylight at midnight only to find yourself surrounded by a swarm of short, fat ponies.

[Effing scary Shetlands.]

Anyway, Deana and I were in the bar talking to each other about the year 1066, the Battle of Hastings and the awesomeness of flipping ones bean, when we failed to notice the tall, lanky guy circling.

Finally he gave up and came up to our table.

"When are you guys going to notice me?" he asked.

[Some line, we thought.]

"Seriously, I've been trying to get your attention for an hour. I'm by myself. You have to adopt me," he said.

He was really tall.

[He even had really tall arms and legs.]

His face kind of reminded us of Howdy Doody... if Howdy Doody had grown up to be handsome.... and really, really tall.

I asked him a LOT of way too personal questions that he refused to answer, so I sent him a second set... less juicy, but still good.

Enjoy!

I understand you met and married your wife when you were very young. Can you tell me the story of how you met and fell in love?

I was 18 and in the middle of my first (and only) year at the University of Toronto. I, probably unsurprisingly, spent a lot of time online. Some of that time was spent in a chatroom on the Undernet where a bunch of non-perverts who self-reported their ages as between 17 and 21 would hang out way too late at night. My wife was one such non-pervert, living in San Jose, and we would spend hours typing back and forth at each other. Yadda yadda yadda I moved to California that summer. :} Actually, she flew out to Toronto for Spring Break, buying a plane ticket despite my protestation that she was crazy for doing it and especially crazy since she hadn't even seen a picture of me at that point and the pictures I finally did send were a couple of years old. We spent that week getting to know each other very quickly and very powerfully. In June, after the school year ended I sold my guitar for a plane ticket to California and spent a month in San Jose with her.

I believe you are Canadian and your wife is a U.S. Citizen and that, in marrying her, you relocated to the states. What was involved in that decision for you and how does it feel to live the expatriate life?

The relocation happened a few years before we married. I moved in August of 1996 and we lived together for about two and a half years before we were finally married. It was a fairly easy decision to make. After I returned home from that June trip we tried to figure out how our relationship was ever going to work with me in Toronto and her in San Jose. I toyed with the holiday-visit plan, but it's not like we were rolling in cash. Then she asked me to move. No, she asked me why I couldn't move. And there were hardly any reasons. I have US citizenship anyway, I had already been living away from home for a year, and I, uh, was on a little bit of academic probation at U of T: too many hours spent online, or hammered in my apartment with my roommates, and not enough hours spent reading about Canadian politics and European history. There were very few reasons not to move, and a great reason to move. So, in August I sold my computer for a plane ticket and some money to live on for a while and I moved in with her and her roommates in San Jose.

What do you miss most about Canada while living in the U.S.?

In the winter I miss the snow; until I visit and my father makes me shovel his deck and his driveway and doesn't give me an allowance for it. I miss the Canadian seasons. I miss family and old friends. I suppose what I miss most of all is just feeling connected to a place instead of just to people. My home is where my family is, but my roots are where my Roots sweatshirts come from.

What do you like about living in the U.S.?

Mexican food and Disneyland.

How would you describe the ways that becoming a father have fundamentally changed you?

I have always been obsessive, or easily addicted to something. When I was young it was video games, slightly older it was, well, still video games but maybe there was more alcohol involved in the playing of them. I used to smoke. I used to say that I was "drinking the world interesting". When my daughter was born all of that obsessive energy finally found it's focus. When I saw her for the first time the rest of the world dulled and she glowed in my vision, like the universe was marking her so that I could pick her out wherever she was. I still get obsessive about other things (um, hi, I wrote seven blog posts this week!) but the world no longer needs any help to be interesting to me: as long as my daughter is in it the world glows right along with her.

What is your favorite drink?

Linkwood 12 year old single malt scotch.

What is your biggest fault?

Arrogance. I'm smart and funny and I know it.

I know that you are in school studying philosophy… what drew you to that line of study? Who is your favorite philosopher / what line of thinking do you find most resonant and why?

I started in Philosophy and Political Science at U of T. My original intent was to go to law school afterward, but as it turned out I started to hate the idea of practicing law. I grew more and more interested in issues about the mind, what thinking is, and the history of those questions. The most influential philosopher in my academic life has been John Locke and his bare empiricism about the mind. I've also internalized a lot of what Paul and Patricia Churchland have said about the mind and scientific inquiry. They are eliminativists, which means that they think our folk-psychological categories of describing our mental lives are hopelessly inaccurate and just need to be eliminated in favor of more rigorous scientific terms. "Idea" is a sloppy term, and I already think about patterns of neural activation instead of "ideas" and "feelings". Not all the time, and usually not in conversation. But often enough that I recognize how much I've taken to heart.

What kinds of experiences take your breath away?

Always travel experiences, but the ones involving new people. For instance, my wife and I were in Rosarito, Mexico one weekend, staying at what used to be a Hollywood escape hotel back in the 50's. While we were in the bar/dance club on the dance floor the hotel lost power and the band had to stop playing. The lights were out and the floor was lit by starlight and moonlight glowing through the windows. Total silence for a couple of seconds. And then an African couple out on the floor just said "keep it going" and they started pounding the floor with their feet in a contagious rhythm. The washed-up musician who had been running the Karaoke Night in the other room jumped on stage and started singing at the top of his lungs, using the stomping as his back beat. Everyone on the floor joined in the dancing and stomping and singing. Experiences like that are why I travel. Sure, it happens at home for someone (the guy running the Karaoke session was just at work and then, bam, he's creating solid memories for a bunch of people), but I think being away from home increases the frequency of those experiences.

Friday, July 25, 2008

“I wasn’t expecting a white baby,” she said. “No one told me the baby was white. It’s not that I minded.I was just so startled by it at first. The social worker later told me she wished I could haveseen the look on my face when the baby arrived.”

Ms. Jewel is an African American woman in her late sixties that just retired from The Mayor and The Rooster’s daycare center.

She’s the mother of three of her own children as well as the adoptive mother of four children that originally came to her as foster children.

Sometimes when daycare is closed (as it is this week) Ms. Jewel comes and cares for The Mayor and The Rooster so K and I can carry on with our normal work week.

Yesterday at the end of the day, the kids were having the time of their lives hiding under an empty, five-dollar kiddie pool from Target while Ms. Jewel and I sat rocking on the front porch.

We were chatting about the daycare center.

“What’s it like to work for Ms. Light?” I asked.

Ms. Light, a white woman, is the center director.

“She and I have been through so much that we’re able to have our fights and carry on." Ms. Jewel said. "We go way back. ”

[Ms. Light didn’t speak to me for the entire fall semester because I went a little ballistic about how the television was not a childcare provider. Ms. Light didn’t particularly appreciate my position. I did not feel heard. Ugliness ensued. The television was turned off though. Snap!]

“You know Ms. Light’s eldest daughter, Flora?” Ms. Jewel asked me.

I nodded.

I’ve seen Flora around the daycare center since The Mayor was a baby. She’s long and lean, all limbs and joints. Flora wears glasses, has a bazillion freckles and generally seems like both a kooky and kind young girl.

“I had her first,” Ms. Jewel said.

“Had her?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“I fostered her before Ms. Light adopted her.”

“Really? I knew she was adopted, but I didn’t know you fostered her.”

“I wasn’t expecting a white baby,” she said. “No one told me the baby was white. It’s not that I minded. I was just so startled by it at first. The social worker later told me she wished I could have seen the look on my face when the baby arrived.”

“Flora was only a month old when I got her.” Ms. Jewel told me. “They said she would only be with us for a few weeks.”

“I had never fostered a white child before. Because she was so little and up all night for feedings, my husband, my oldest daughter and I took turns sleeping with her. I don’t think she ever slept in a crib. She was always curled into the side of one of us.”

“I was working at the daycare center even back then,” she told me. “I told Ms. Light that I had to have a spot for the baby and she let Flora in. I’ll never forget the look of surprise on her face when she peered down at Flora and saw that she was white.”

Ms. Jewel told me how attached to Flora she and her family became.

“My extended family was surprised to see us with a white child but we all fell in love with her.”

At eighteen months, Flora was still being fostered by Ms. Jewel.

As we rocked on the porch, Ms. Jewel remembered.

“We had a screened in porch that ran the whole length of the house,” she said. “Back before you had to worry about crime, we used to make pallets and sleep out there. It was cool… nice. You can’t do that now.”

Ms. Jewel rocked.

“I remember Flora sitting on the steps of that porch when the whole family got together… this little white child that we all loved.”

Ms. Jewel turned to face me.

“You know, at the time, it was illegal for blacks to adopt white children.”

I didn’t know, but I quickly did the math. Flora is fourteen, so... Ms. Jewel was talking about 1994.

1994? Really?

Illegal?

“We were really attached to Flora so we had to find her a home. In the end, Ms. Light adopted Flora. Her own firstborn was only thirteen months old, but she took Flora in and adopted her right around her second birthday.”

[Ms. Light? The Ms. Light I yelled at about the television being on that time at daycare?]

“To this day, Flora is part of both of our families. She tells everyone that she has a black family and a white family,” Ms. Jewel told me.

Laughing, she added, “and she always says she had black parents first.”

After Ms. Jewel left, I thought about the way that circumstances of love, need and relative proximity have forever entangled Ms. Jewel and Ms. Light’s families.

An employer and employee bound together through Flora.

It’s amazing how much you can’t tell about people just by looking at them.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Yesterday morning, my last morning at home before leaving town, I paused in the hall and silently watched Rooster eating breakfast at the dining room table.Her legs seemed to stretch further down towards the floor than ever before. She sat straight and tall eating scrambled eggs and buttered toast.

She was, in that moment, herself in the present, her former baby self and a shadowy suggestion of the woman she will become.

I tried to memorize the way her legs poked out of her pink pajama bottom shorts trying to freeze a moment in time, to hold this girl still, this shape shifter of mine, who changes so drastically, it seems, every day.

Like his sister, The Mayor is in a constant state of transition. With every new day, he becomes someone more complex and capable than the day before. I never have time to know the boy he is on Tuesday, because on Wednesday he is more.

Both of them live in a state of eternal becoming.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, with the support of a floating ring, The Mayor jumped off the diving board.

After countless practice jumps from the pool’s edge in water he could stand in, he steeled himself against his fear, and jumped from the board into the deep end.

Later that afternoon, when K and I weren’t paying the strictest attention, The Mayor decided to jump without the float.

Someone must have yelled or called out. There must have been some sound that alerted us but I don’t remember it.

I only know that in a single instant everyone at the pool turned to focus on The Mayor's small splashing hands, the only parts of his body that were visible above the water.

The Rooster was wrapped in a towel on my lap, but my body was in motion before my mind understood exactly what I was seeing or what it might mean.

I was up out of my seat with the Rooster halfway down, when I saw K’s body flying across the water.

I mean it, I saw my husband fly.

Though the whole episode couldn’t have lasted more than ten seconds, time warped and shifted as if we had watched the scene through a fun house mirror.

K sat at the pool’s edge with The Mayor in his lap. Five feet away, I could hear my husband’s heart hammering in his chest keeping time with my own.

The Mayor wasn’t at all frightened.

Our instinct was to remain calm, not to frighten our son with our own fear.

K calmly explained drowning to The Mayor who accepted it as a matter of fact and went back to using the ring to jump in the pool.

Last night, The Mayor, Rooster and I went for a swim while K shopped for groceries to get them through the five motherless days to come.

I watched The Mayor as two boys coaxed him out beyond the roped off toddler area.

The Mayor followed the boys, but when they tried to tempt him to venture out to water that he knew was too deep, he turned without saying a word and returned.

“Look what I can do!” he said to me, smiling.

Then he spread his body out across the water and floated on his back.

To the best of my knowledge, he’d never done that before.

His arms were stretched out on either side of him and his toes stuck up out of the water as his body bobbed and spun on the water’s surface.

He relaxed into the feeling of floating and let the water carry and support him.

I watched him and his suddenly dog paddling sister and marveled at the way that everyday is an adventure of self-discovery for them.

Standing there, watching The Mayor sneak up on and soak my Great Aunt Kate with his water gun, I focused less on the sand carried out to sea by the receding waves and more on the shore beneath my feet.

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

I am having a hard time finding the thread of my own story lately.Every day requires the complex navigation of set after set of high-speed, racing curves while driving a clunky station wagon built in the early 1970’s.

Every minute of my life is so full of responsibilities and obligations that they crash into each other like a massive highway pile up.

Tasks that I should attend to lay on their backs by the road side like over-turned bugs kicking their legs and refusing to die. As I go careening past them, they seem to call after me,

“You still have to do this, you moron!”

At work, a situation has arisen that I can only liken metaphorically to an oil spill of Exxon Valdez-like proportions.

Though I didn’t contribute to the creation of the mess, I find myself employed, day after day, for far longer hours that I usually work, wiping thick black goo from the individual feathers of once beautiful waterfowl armed only with a cocktail napkin.

[Oh, how effective and useful I feel!]

Every day at 4:30, I leave the flock of greasy, dejected birds to race to my own personal mom-a-thon and related duties, the foremost of which is the one where I endlessly repeat,

“Stop fighting with your (sister/brother).”

Yesterday evening, the kids and I careened through the farmer’s market trying not to hit the other patrons with our cart.

I didn’t have an actual grocery list because that would mean that I had time to think about groceries in advance.

I tried to think on my feet about what I might feed my family this week and simultaneously attempted to keep my two children from colliding head long into piles of produce.

I rounded the corner into an aisle full of melons when The Mayor, from way down the aisle, shouted,

“MOMMY, I KNOW BOYS DON’T GROW BOOBIES, BUT DO THEY GET KIPPLES? DO I HAVE KIPPLES? WHAT ARE KIPPLES?”

When the kids finally passed out in their little beds (or rather on the floor NEAR the bed in Rooster’s case), I returned to the endless bird cleaning and remained there long into the night until finally I couldn’t see straight.

These are my days.

Consequently, finding the space in my head to capture my usual blog-story-a-day has, like so many other things, fallen on its back as one of the overturned insects by the side of the road.

My blog waves its little insect legs at me each morning and I blow by it wistfully feeling like I'm being pinched in the kipples.